Great Throughts Treasury

"All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, and he who keeps back the truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal or both."

"Thoughts are Things" video clip at http://www.churchofspiritualscience.org/thoughts_are_things_prentice_mulford.html"

"Ask for true thoughts. Ask for power to believe them when they come. Ask for power to be able to believe in a Supreme Wisdom, not in a half believing way, but as literally as you believe in the existence of the Atlantic Ocean. Ask persistently and importunately."

"Does not refinement imply greater power, as the greater power of the crude iron comes out in steel; and are not these greater and as yet almost unrecognized powers to come out of the highest and most complex form of known organization, man; and are all of man's powers yet known? "

"Every thought of yours is a real thing – a force."

"Faith is power to believe and power to see."

"Goodwill to others is constructive thought. It helps build you up. It is good for your body. It makes your blood purer, your muscles stronger, and your whole form more symmetrical in shape. It is the real elixir of life. The more such thought you attract to you, the more life you will have."

"But it is a law of Nature, that every demand, silent or spoken, brings its supply of the thing wished for in proportion to the intensity of the wish, and the growing numbers so wishing; who, by the action of their minds upon some one subject, set in motion that silent force of thought, not as yet heeded in the world's schools of philosophy, which brings the needed supply."

"But a truth always goes straight ahead despite mistake and blunder, and proves itself at last."

"In the education of the future, music for every person will be deemed as necessary as is reading and writing at present, for it will be clearly seen that it is a most powerful means for bringing life, health and strength."

"In the spiritual life every person is his or her own discoverer, and you need not grieve if your discoveries are not believed in by others. It is your business to push on find more and increase individual happiness."

"Internally, secretly, among the thinking thousands of this and other lands, is this and many other questions now being asked: "Why must we so wither and decay, and lose the best that life is worth living for, just as we have gained that experience and wisdom that best fits us to live?" The voice of the people is always at first a whispered voice. The prayer or demand or desire of the masses is always at first a secret prayer, demand, wish, or desire, which one man at first dare scarcely whisper to his neighbor for fear of ridicule. "

"It is a stupid blunder to look back at the little we know of the past, and say that it is the unerring index finger telling us what is to be in the future."

"It is the impertinence of a dense ignorance for any of us to say what is in or what is to be in the order of nature."

"Let us remember, so far as we can, that every unpleasant thought is a bad thing literally put in the body."

"Millions so wished in silence for means to travel more rapidly, to send intelligence more rapidly; and this brought steam and the electric telegraph. "

"Possibilities and miracles mean the same thing."

"Shall we make a God, of whom we are no part and belonging, and humble and abase ourselves before that God and call ourselves “miserable sinners” or “unworthy creatures,” “unworthy of his slightest favor,” and then beg for that favor."

"If this planet has been what geology teaches it has been,--a planet fuller of coarser, cruder, and more violent forces than now; abounding in forms of coarser vegetable, animal, and even human life and organization than now; of which its present condition is a refinement and improvement as regards vegetable, animal, and man,--is not this the suggestion, the hint, the proof, of a still greater refinement and improvement for the future; a refinement and improvement going on now? "

"Soon other questions and demands are to be answered, questions ever going out in silence from multitudes; and, in answering them, in at first attempting to carry out and prove the answers and the means shown to accomplish or realize many things deemed impossible or visionary, there will be mistake and stupidity, and blunder and silliness, and breakdowns and failures, and consequent ridicule; just as there were ten smashes on railways, and ten bursted boilers in the earlier era of the use of steam, to one of today. "

"The man who succeeds must always in mind or imagination live, move, think, and act as if he had gained that success, or he never will gain it."

"There are two kinds of age,--the age of your body, and the age of your mind. Your body in a sense is but a growth, a construction, of today, and for the use of today. Your mind is another growth or construction millions of years old. It has used many bodies in its growth. It has grown from very small beginnings to its present condition, power, and capacity in the use of these many bodies. You have, in using these bodies, been far ruder and coarser than you are now. "

"There belongs to every human being a higher self and a lower self--a self or mind of the spirit which has been growing for ages, and a self of the body, which is but a thing of yesterday. The higher self is full of prompting idea, suggestion and aspiration. This it receives of the Supreme Power. All this the lower or animal self regards as wild and visionary. The higher self argues possibilities and power for us greater than men and women now possess and enjoy. The lower self says we can only live and exist as men and women have lived and existed before us. The higher self craves freedom from the cumbrousness, the limitations, the pains and disabilities of the body. The lower self says that we are born to them, born to ill, born to suffer, and must suffer as have so many before us. The higher self wants a standard for right and wrong of its own. The lower self says we must accept a standard made for us by others--by general and long-held opinion, belief and prejudice."

"To say a thing 'must be', is the very power that makes it. "

"Ultimately you must, if not in this in some other existence, be symmetrical; because the evolution of the mind, of which the evolution of our bodies from coarser to higher forms is but a crude counterpart, is ever toward the higher, finer, better, and happier."

"Unreasoning prejudices are bred out of the continual living in the past."

"What is most necessary to know and what the Infinite will show us as we demand, is the value we are to others. In proportion to our power for increasing human happiness, and in proportion as we recognize that power will the needful agencies come to us for making our material condition more comfortable."

"When in any undertaking we put our main dependence and trust in an individual or individuals and not in the Supreme Power, we are off the main track of the most perfect success."

"Why do you say 'I am always sick?' Because you are looking back, living in your past ailments and thereby bring more on you."

"You are not young relatively. Your present youth means that your body is young. The older your spirit, the better can you preserve the youth, vigor, and elasticity of your body. Because the older your mind, the more power has it gathered from its many existences. "

"You can use that power for the preservation of beauty, of health, of vigor, of all that can make you attractive to others. You can also unconsciously use the same power to make you ugly, unhealthy, weak, diseased, and unattractive. The more you use this power in either of these directions, the more will it make you ugly or beautiful, healthy or unhealthy, attractive or unattractive; that is, as regards unattractiveness for this one existence. "

"You have lived as now you could not live at all, and in forms of life or expression very different from the form you are now using; and each new body or young body you have worn has been a new suit of clothes for your mind; and what you call "death" has been and is but the wearing out of this suit through ignorance of the means, not so much of keeping it in repair, as of building it continually into a newer and newer freshness and vitality."

"Youth physically is fresh and blooming because it packs no past sad material remembrances with it."

"A person who sets his or her mind on the dark side of life, who lives over and over the misfortunes and disappointments of the past, prays for similar misfortunes and disappointments in the future. If you will see nothing but ill luck in the future, you are praying for such ill luck and will surely get it."

"All degrees of failure are based on timidity."

"All degrees of success are based on courage ? mental or physical."

"All experiences are valuable for the wisdom they bring or suggest. But when you have once gained wisdom and knowledge from any experience, there is little profit in repeating it, especially if it has been unpleasant."

"As a spirit, you are a part of God or the Infinite Force or Spirit of good. As such part, you are an ever-growing power which can never lessen, and must always increase, even as it has in the past through many ages always increased, and built you up, as to intelligence, to your present mental stature. The power of your mind has been growing to its present quality and clearness through many more physical lives than the one you are now living. Through each past life you have unconsciously added to its power. Every struggle of the mind -- be it struggle against pain, struggle against appetite, struggle for more skill in the doing of anything, struggle for greater advance in any art or calling, struggle and dissatisfaction at your failings and defects -- is an actual pushing of the spirit to greater power, and a greater relative completion of yourself, -- and with such completion, happiness. For the aim of living is happiness."

"But no one experience should be followed and dwelt in forever. Life in its more perfected state will be full of alterations?not a rut, into which if you are once set you must continually travel."

"Children who come into the world unwelcomed by the parent and are brought up only because custom, conventionality and public opinion demand their support from that parent, are most unfortunate, and suffer from the blight and starvation thereby caused their spirits."

"Cynicism is born of repulsion and personal prejudice carried to its extreme. The cynic ends by finding everybody unbearable and at last hates himself."

"Demand imperiously and persistently any quality of character in which you may be lacking, and you will attract increase of such quality. Demand more patience or decision, more judgment or courage, more hopefulness or exactness, and you will increase in such qualities. These qualities are real elements. They belong to the subtler, and as yet unrecognized, chemistry of Nature."

"Every mind trains itself, generally unconsciously, to its peculiar character or quality of thought. Whatever that training is, it cannot be immediately changed. We may have trained our minds unconsciously to nourish evil or troubled thought. We may never have realized that brooding over disappointment, living in a grief, dreading a loss, fretting for fear this or that might not succeed as we wish, was building up a destructive force which has bled away our strength, created disease, unfitted us for business, and caused us loss of money and possibly loss of friends."

"Every order of mind or quality of thought must have association with a corresponding order of mind and quality of thought, or it will suffer."

"Every regret, every mournful thought, takes so much out of your life. It is force used to pile on more misery."

"Fear is but another name for lack of power to control our minds, or, in other words, to control the kind of thought we think or put out."

"Gossip is fascinating. There is an exhilaration in scandal and the raking over of our friend?s or neighbor?s or enemy?s faults is almost equal to that produced by champagne. But in the end we pay dearly for these pleasures."

"Hospitality is expected from relatives, when to expect hospitality is to make such entertainment the result of a demand."

"How can we send the highest love to another if we do not have it for ourselves? If we are careless and unappreciative of the body's great use to us--if we never give it a thought of admiration or gratitude for the many functions which it performs for us --if we regard it with the same indifference that we may have for the post to which we hitch a horse, we shall send that same quality of sentiment and thought to the person of whom we think most, and the tendency will be to generate a similar disregard for themselves. Either they will do this, or seeking light of the Infinite, they will find themselves obliged in self-protection to refuse the love which we send them, because of its coarser and grosser quality. This is sometimes the error of mothers, who say: " I don't care for myself so that my son or daughter's welfare is assured. I give and devote my whole life to them.""

"If you send from you in thought the elements of worry, fret, hatred or grief, you are putting in action forces that are injurious to your mind and body. The power to forget implies the power of driving the unpleasant and hurtful thought or element, and bringing in its place the profitable element, to build up instead of tearing us down."